A fancy new Start menu and rounded menu corners aren’t the only things that Windows 11 users will be able to appreciate when the new operating system begins rolling out next month. As detailed in a new video with Steve Dispensa, VP of Enterprise Management at Microsoft, Windows 11 will also feature plenty of under-the-hood updates that will make the new OS feel faster than its predecessor.
One of the major changes is how Windows 11 handles foreground apps. According to Dispena, foreground apps now have access to more CPU and other system resources thanks to better prioritization, which should keep things feeling snappy even when the processor is stressed.
So under the hood, we’ve done a lot of work in memory management to favor the app windows you have running in the foreground so that they’re prioritized with more CPU and other system resources. This also carries forward when you launch an app under load. For example, you can see in task manager that my CPU is running with a 90 percent load on it, what we internally call P90. And that would typically slow you down as you open more apps. So I’m going to launch a couple of apps, first Excel and it loads quickly. Then I’ll snap that window to the left so you can see the task manager on the right. Now, we’ll open Word; again, super fast. And then I’ll put that window below the Excel window. As you can still see in the task manager, despite the heavy load on the CPU, both apps launched as they normally would without any lag. And that’s because these processes are in the foreground so they get more compute resource.
Dispensa goes on to talk about the Sleeping Tabs feature in Microsoft Edge and how it enables considerable reductions in memory and CPU usage. These improvements should prove to be particularly useful for Windows 11 users on portable devices, as they must contend with limited battery life.
[…] we’ve introduced sleeping tabs out of the box. Here, you can see the settings in Edge. In my case, I’ve got it set to sleep after five minutes of inactivity. And this is user or policy configurable, by the way. And if you look at the browser tabs, you’ll see that a number of tabs are asleep, as denoted by the faded icons. And as I hover over it, for example, the adobe.com tab, you’ll see the notification that the tab is asleep to save resources. And the same is true for these tabs with Microsoft Word as I hover over it. And this one for PowerPoint. In fact, when we introduced this, we saw an average savings of 32 percent for memory and 37 percent for CPU usage. Now, all of these optimizations combined from the OS and apps, as you can imagine, also equate to longer battery life.
Windows 11 will also resume from sleep quicker than its predecessor. Thanks to improvements in memory manage, resume from sleep is now 25 percent faster than in Windows 10. That means waking up a system should feel instantaneous for most users.
[…] Windows 11 has an optimized instant-on experience as your PC resumes from sleep. In the sleep state or S3 mode, your RAM stays energized so it still has power while most other components are powered down. Now, when you resume from sleep, two things happen. First, we’ve optimized calls to hardware components that need to power on for better overall memory management. And at the software layer, we’ve reduced starvation across key processing threads so that power is preserved for the threads that really need it. Now, this approach optimizes resume from sleep by 25 percent. So for most people, resume will be almost instantaneous. It also means that your device can stay in sleep state longer and not hibernate as often.
Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 will launch on October 5. The new operating system will be rolled out gradually to eligible Windows 10 systems as a free upgrade.
Source: Microsoft